Make Britain Great Again

MANCHESTER, England — Who wants Brexit? Not David Cameron, the British prime minister, for he opposes it. Not the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, whose Euroskepticism is subsumed by fear of Little Englander nationalism. And not even Boris Johnson, the mayor of London and unofficial leader of the campaign to leave the European Union, who has spent much of his career arguing that Britain would be better off in a reformed union.

But Mr. Johnson wants to be prime minister, and many of the Conservative Party members who will select their next leader are euroskeptic. And so last month Mr. Johnson came to Manchester to campaign for Brexit in a disused television studio that was ugly, cold and half-filled with an audience that was largely white and middle age.

“It’s a question of sovereignty. I would like our parliament to be sovereign and make its own decisions,” said Michael Powell, a retired doctor. “I fear that if we don’t leave the E.U. we shall be overwhelmed by people who wish to come here.”

“I feel that we are being taken over. This open border with all the trouble in the world is so scary,” said Susan Fink, another retiree. “It seems it’s only the common man on the street who seems to know that it’s being used to traffic people and terrorists all over Europe.”

It is usual for europhiles to call euroskeptics racists and imbeciles dreaming of a Britain that never was — a happy Britain in control of one-quarter of a happy world. But many of the people I met were rational and frightened. (Others were more amorous: I met a femme fatale with a leg in plaster cast. On it was scrawled, like a lover’s note, #Brexit.)

Then came Mr. Johnson. His weapon is comic derision, his tragic flaw is glibness. Some call him Britain’s Donald Trump. Both men are raging narcissists and blondes, both are media obsessions, both loathe detail — for what has that to do with them? But I do not think Mr. Trump speaks Latin, as Mr. Johnson does, so I will assist him: The Latin for Mexicans Go Home is Mexicani Ite Domum!

He rolled on his heels and called Brits “passengers locked in the back of a minicab with a wonky satnav driven by a driver who doesn’t have perfect command of English and going in a direction we, frankly, don’t want to go.” He thinks he is Winston Churchill, but he is really Lord Halifax who, after the fall of France in 1940, wished to lead Britain out of the turmoil of Europe and back to the “splendid isolation” of 19th-century British self-confidence. In 1940 this position was called appeasement.

The Remain Camp oppose isolation, splendid or dismal. If Britain leaves the European Union, this camp says, we will lose our global prominence and the economy will shrink by a very precise 6 percent by 2030.

“Knickers to the pessimists and to the merchants of gloom,” said Mr. Johnson to the audience, who cheered. “If we hold our nerve and we’re not cowed and we vote for freedom and we vote for democracy on June 23 then I believe this country will prosper and thrive as never before — and yes it will be independence day on June 24.”

Even as he delighted the crowd, I pondered Mr. Johnson’s ability or even desire to save democracy in Britain. His Conservative party has disenfranchised voters and is planning to cut funding to opposition parties. Mr. Johnson’s term as mayor of London, which ends this week, has been marked chiefly by crises left unsolved. (In a poll last year Londoners had the most pessimistic views of any region in Britain of his prime ministerial potential.)

He likes to distract from his inadequacies by, say, dangling from a zip wire while holding two union flags, as he did in 2012, or by bullying journalists, as Mr. Trump might. At the rally in Manchester Mr. Johnson spotted Michael Crick, a television journalist, doing a piece live on camera. He said, “Shut up ... Can we tell Crick ... Can someone go and interrupt Crick at the back there?”

A bald man tried to stop the broadcast but “Crick” was insistent: “I’m just trying to explain what’s going on here,” he said. Mr. Johnson did not want Mr. Crick to explain anything. He prefers the trivial questions, and Mr. Crick does not ask them. During the Q&A that followed his speech, a man asked Mr. Johnson who styled his hair. The moderator asked, “Do you have a real question?” But I have followed Mr. Johnson for years, and that is a real question.

He also resorts to Little Englander nationalism — not from conviction, but from cynicism: Last month Mr. Johnson suggested, in an essay for a right-wing British tabloid, that the “part-Kenyan” Barack Obama might have an “ancestral dislike of the British empire.”

The Brexit camp is not all nostalgists longing to return to British exceptionalism. Mostly it attracts people who fear that Brussels excludes them and that there is a genuine deficit of democracy in Britain; that the political class, with a few exceptions, has forgotten them. They are not wrong. Where they err is in believing that a politician who deals in trivia and bombast will treat them any better. Mr. Johnson believes in Mr. Johnson. The Brexit campaign is only a step on the path of his ambition.